While living in Nagoya, Japan in 1996, I spent quite a few afternoons browsing the local model shops (for anyone who is interested in Japanese models, I strongly recommend a trip to Japan sometime in you life— you will be astounded). Like most people who watched the series Neon Genesis Evangelion, I was hooked on the characters, and when I saw this kit of Rei and Asuka, I couldn\'t resist. It stayed in a box of things brought back from Japan for several years, but I finally pulled it out and started working on it

This article is a re-print from my old website from some years ago. I've noticed that there are a a few links to the old page out in the wild-wild-web, so I've resurrected this content in my new website. Hope you enjoy it!

I'll be honest... I've never liked the Daedalus design. I've always found it uninspired, with terribly gross lines. As a precursor to the famous "Starship Enterprise" of Star Trek fame, I think it's a clunker. When the design for the Enterprise from the series of the same name was released, I decided to re-imagine the Daedalus to better match the revised technological and visual canon from this prequel series.

Like the M-882, this model was sitting around unfinished for a long time. I just barely finished this piece in time for Wonderfest (driving to Louisville with the windows down and wet paint curing in the back of the car).

Several years ago, a thread was started on the Starship Modeler forums which was focused on the very popular Leif Ericsson model. Very quickly, fans of this model began to flesh out the broader universe this ship implied: The Strategic Space Command. I became interested in the more personal aspects of the SSC: what do their equipment look like?

This is one of those projects that has spent a long, long time in an incomplete state. Coming home from Wonderfest last year inspired me to finish this and several other models. Of course, here it is, March, and I'm just finishing up the one. Par for the course I guess. I've got another one coming along that sort of goes together with this one, but I'm not sure if it will finish in time for the contest.

The following are photos of my Wonderfest Merit Award-winning scratch-build: Kyle Katarn's ship, the Moldy Crow, from the computer game Jedi Knight. The model measures approximately 15 inches in length, and includes a fully detailed cockpit and lit instrument panels and engine exhausts.

The Shooting Star is a near-future, orbital, or supra-orbital fighter that I designed with a goal of realism. There are a lot of elements that make this a distinctive design. The first of which is that I've eschewed the primary tropes of Sci-fi space fighters.

There's no canopy, no streamlining, no wings, no "hyperdrive", and very limited armament. The only two concessions to SF convention I chose to make in the design are a small-scale fusion reactor for power, and the very notion of the reasonablility of a small-scale space-fighter in the first place. In fact, as I was designing this craft, the first problem I decided to solve was the logistics of how a fighter would be transported between engagements.